Countries and Nationalities not in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code

Good afternoon,

The API returns country, nationalities and countries of residence in natural language:
“country”: “England”
“nationality”: “French”,
“country_of_residence”: “United Kingdom”,

Is there a way to get them following the convention ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, please?
If not, do you use any mapping tool between plain English and the ISO format to stay 100% accurate with your dataset?

Finally, the API displays only month and year for officers’ date of birth. Is there any way to get the day of birth, please?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Best regards,
Nicolas

Unofficial answers (take with a grain of salt):

Until recently (late last year) Country/Nationalities etc where submitted as unvalidated free text fields. This has been changed to being validated through against a list maintained by CH. More info here: IMPORTANT CHANGES to Country and Nationality fields - Companies House XML Gateway Forum and in various other threads on the XML forum (http://xmlforum.aws.chdev.org/). These are not ISO based, I can’t remember if they ever said they were going to go back and fix the old data to match, but if they were, I wouldn’t expect it any time soon.

There’s not way to get the day of birth through the API. Some Government/official bodies have access to it through other means (and you’d need to contact them through other channels), but it’s not available to the general public.

@ash thank you for responding to the query. You are right that we are unable to change the data on the register because we don’t have the legal power. As of the change last year countries have to appear on this list: List of nationalities - GOV.UK. You can reliably map these nationalities into the ISO codes but you will have to handle the legacy entries which do not map.

The day of birth is not available to the public due to a law change in 2016.

Thank you to both of you for clarifying.

Best regards,
Nicolas